How can I accept user keyboard input on my webpage without using the html "input" function?

Im creating a website that is going to be text based (entirely). The navigation for the site is going to be dependent upon what users type in, but I do not want to use the "input" function in html, I wanted to mimic a linux box or the old ms-dos prompt styles for my site (blinking cursor and all). So basically the user would type something like /home ... and /home would be stored as a variable saying go-to www.my-home-page.com etc etc, I know this is going to take a lot of if / then statements and that's fine, I just need to get past the part of accepting user input, the language required to do this matters not (php, html, js, etc). Thanks in advance.